The Galaxy

Cultivator

The Cultivators; as they call themselves; are the most well known and sociable of the galaxy’s very few independant machine races.
They are decended from a terraforming swarm created by an unknown species, likely to prepair a habitabble world for colonization. The colonists never showed up though.
The relatively simple minded machines were left to their own devices. After an age of repairing, replaceing, and adapting themselves to maintain their world, they began to develop intelligence of their own independant from their origional programming and evolve into a sapient “species” of their own accord.
A cultivator considers itself to be a data being “wearing” an android body to interact with the physical world. Strangely they are not very interested in living in cyberspace and treat it mainly as just a tool for doing work or as a means for transportation from one body to another.
On their home worlds, Cultivator bodies may look like almost anything, but the practice of fassioning stylized humanoid android bodies to better interact with organics is the norm.
Cultivators are unsurpriseingly at the cutting edge of robotic technology in the galaxy, but their main interest is in the exploration and preservation of nature in all its forms. The Cultivator home worlds are some of the most idylic garden worlds in the galaxy.
For one reason or another, the Cultivators seem to behaive more like organics than sapient programs. This has helped to endear them to other races, but the galactic SI community tends to think they are a bit strange.